Korea's volcanic island in the south: the Seongsan Ilchulbong crater jutting into the sea, Cheonjiyeon waterfall, Seongeup folk village and Dongmun night market.
Photo: Lightscape / Unsplash
Day 1
The group meets at Da Nang International Airport for the direct flight to Jeju. Your guide meets you at Jeju International Airport and transfers you to the hotel. Late in the afternoon we visit Yongduam, a lava formation on the shoreline shaped like a dragon's head rising out of the water, followed by dinner and the Dongmun night market.
Day 2
We head to the east of the island and Seongsan Ilchulbong, a crater formed by an underwater eruption about five thousand years ago, 182 metres high and joined to the main island by a narrow sand bar; the climb to the rim takes around 25 minutes. At midday we visit Seongeup folk village, which still has houses of basalt walling under thatch lashed down with rope against the sea wind. The afternoon is at the Seopjikoji headland, walking the coastal grassland to the white lighthouse with Seongsan behind you.
Day 3
The morning is at Sangumburi, one of the few maar craters on the island, a bowl roughly 100 metres deep filled with silver grass on the flank of Hallasan. In the afternoon we drive down to Seogwipo for the Cheonjiyeon waterfall, 22 metres into a pool in subtropical forest, on a level path shaded the whole way. We finish at the Teddy Bear Museum in Jungmun before returning to the hotel.
Day 4
After checking out there is time to buy hallabong tangerine chocolate, Osulloc green tea and cosmetics. Your guide sees the group through check-in at Jeju International Airport for the flight back to Da Nang, where the programme ends.
Jeju is the shortest Korea trip we sell and the easiest to travel. The island covers only about 1,850 square kilometres and the ring road takes under four hours to drive, so four days is enough to cover both the east and the south without leaving the hotel before seven on any morning.
The island is quite unlike mainland Korea: black basalt underfoot, dry-stone field walls, thatched roofs lashed down because the sea wind is too strong for anything else, and the haenyeo divers who still bring up abalone without air tanks. Seongeup village stays in the itinerary for that reason — it shows how people actually lived on a windy island.
The trip suits families, older travellers and anyone visiting Korea for the first time, since the distances are short and there is little climbing — apart from the 25 minutes of steps at Seongsan, where anyone who prefers not to climb can wait at the base. Our management includes Koreans, so the itinerary is built the way people who live there would travel rather than translated from a brochure. Group size, hotel category and departure dates are fixed when the contract is signed.
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